Trip to the Hills – Day 1: Stars!

Over the next several days, I’m going to post the photos I took on our recent trip up to the Victorian Alps with the family. It was a fun five days, and I took photos every day, with quite a good variety too, so I hope you enjoy them!

After a long drive across the state, we arrived in the late afternoon. The house we stayed at is built on a farm property, with livestock just on the other side of a small (but electrified!) fence. My nieces were introduced to the neighbours by my parents.

While dinner was being prepared, I ducked outside to take a dusk photo of the house. I tried a go at HDR, but I’m not really happy with the result, especially the halo on the tree at the left.

After relaxing for the rest of the day, everyone else turned in for an early night. I didn’t want to waste the opportunity of a dark sky, however. Unfortunately it was a first quarter moon, which did down out the stars somewhat, but this meant that every night the moon would become more of a problem, so astro photography on the first night was a must.

I am especially pleased with this first photo, a fisheye of the galaxy over the house, which I lit by firing the flash several times, walking in front of the house. See below for the technical details. Please view this image at full size to see the stars properly.

• Camera: Canon 350D
• Lens: Sigma 8mm f4 fisheye
• Settings: 27sec @f4.0 ISO1600
• Canon 580EX flash fired bare by hand half a dozen times along the front of the house and up the tree during the exposure.
• Processing: Lightroom 2, mostly to increase contrast, tweak exposure and reduce noise.

Below is a photo of the centre of our galaxy, in the region of the constellation Sagittarius. Below that is a long exposure star trail of a nebula in the same area, taken at full zoom with my 400mm telephoto lens.

Finally, this is a somewhat unusual photo. Before returning to bed, I noticed the bright star Canopus just rising above the horizon. At this elevation, the light from the star passes through a lot of air to reach our eyes. This is what makes the star twinkle. It’s kinda like the wobbly looking lines at the bottom of a swimming pool. This same air movement also has the effect of splitting the stars spectrum up into a rainbow of colours. A keen eye can see the star shimmering in many colours.

To capture the colourful twinkling, I tried a trick that I first read about many years ago when I was first getting into astronomy. I exposed to make the star nice and bright, then set a long shutter time, and during the exposure, I dragged the camera over the star, leaving behind a colourful trail as the star changed colour. Amazing where you can find colour isn’t it?

I took a few other photos that night, well lots of others, but most of the same scene, for stacking together later for longer exposure photos. It’ll take me a while to process these, but I’ll post them when I do, if they turn out to be any good.